What's Canonical thinking about Bazaar?

[Janzert]

Ben Finney wrote:
>> Ian Clatworthy writes:
> 
>>  > Clarifying my earlier response, the "FUD" I struggle with is that
>>  > Bazaar is disadvantaged by it's association with Canonical.
> 
> If that were the idea being touted, I'd agree with you: it's FUD. That's
> not at all what I'm saying.
> 
> What disadvantages Bazaar is the perception that, instead of “Bazaar is
> a community project (and thank you to Canonical for continuing to make
> that possible)”, rather we have “Bazaar is a Canonical product (and the
> community is along for the ride)”.
> 
> Note that *it does not matter* to what extent this perception is true;
> it is the *perception* that is harmful.
> 
> This disadvantages Bazaar in comparison to technically-comparable VCSen
> like Mercurial and Git precisely to the extent that the perception
> remains that those other VCSen are community projects but Canonical has
> a controlling interest in Bazaar.
> 

I completely agree with how this is being perceived by people and that
this perception is hurting Bazaar. The only thing is that you seem to
imply this perception isn't true; I also thought that until the email
starting this thread. That post explicitly says exactly that:

Martin Pool wrote:
> There is a desire to position Bazaar more as "a Canonical open source
> product" rather than "an open source project supported by Canonical" -
> thus the request for the web site name change.

While I think the changes in development focus (although still unknown)
are almost certainly going to be a benefit to Bazaar since they are
going to be driven by the actual use in Ubuntu/Canonical. I think the
change in branding is going to be quite detrimental.

Janzert